Should Christians Drink Alcohol?

I became seriously ill in 1990, 1991, with a disease which normally kills people. If you want to know the name of it, it’s subacute bacterial endocarditis. If you’re not a doctor, it won’t mean much to you. But until they invented antibiotics, it was fatal. And it could have killed me. As I was there in bed, the very night before I was admitted to the hospital, I was asking the Lord. I wasn’t afraid of dying, but I had an intellectual problem. “God, I’ve believed in healing. I’ve preached healing. I’ve seen people healed. I’ve been healed myself. Why am I not healed?”

The Lord gave me a little overview of the way I’d been living for years as a minister. Never involved in sexual immorality, never involved in drunkenness, never misappropriating funds, but very carnal. Living as if this world were all there is. My definition of carnality is living as if there’s no future world. God showed me how He hated carnality. He gave me the text,

“Jacob I have loved, Esau I have hated.”

Esau is the scriptural pattern of the carnal man. That has changed my life. Thank God, I survived. I think the Lord spared me because I was willing to learn my lesson. Ruth and I quoted a scripture,

“The Lord has chastened me severely, but He has not given me over to death.”

That was true in my case. I want to say that I was living a respectable minister’s life. I could tell you the ministers that I was associated with, their names that you would all know. We were all basically living the same way. I’m not judging anybody but myself. But we were, in many ways, extremely carnal.

I had another experience. I didn’t intend to tell this, but I think God wants me to. I do not believe that Christians are prohibited from drinking wine. That’s, it may shock you, but I believe Jesus drank wine. Certainly, Paul recommended Timothy to do the same. Now, don’t get controversial with me, because I’m going to say it in a way that will set your minds at rest.

About September of last year, Ruth and I were staying in a hotel in Eilat, where we’d gone just to get away from the pressures of ministry in Jerusalem. I had drunk maybe two or three glasses of wine. I was perfectly sober. But about 2:00 a.m., I was awakened with a sense of pressure on my brain. The word came to me, ‘stroke’. Thank God, I knew something about spiritual warfare, because I said, “You spirit of stroke, I refuse you. I’m not submitted to you. You have no power over me, no claims against me.” And it lifted.

Then I got out of bed to go to the bathroom, and it took me three attempts to get out of the bed. When I began to walk to the bathroom, I could not walk steadily. I had to hold onto the furniture to get there. Next day, as I meditated on that, I concluded that having drunk that much wine had exposed my brain to this spirit of stroke. I made up my mind, I tell people I have a new diet. It’s a biblical diet. My food is to do the will of Him who sent me and to finish His work. For me, the emphasis now is on ‘finish His work’. Because I’ve been in the Lord’s service 50 years, and I believe I’m in His will, but I haven’t finished His work. I made up my mind, if this would ever come between me and finishing His work, I’ll never touch wine again. I’ve lived by that now.

Please understand, I’m not preaching against drinking wine, because you can be just as wrong on the other side with all your legalism. I mean, I’ve been a Pentecostal long enough to know what legalism is. In actual fact, I think it was partly rebelling against legalism that tipped me over on the other side. See, the pathway that leads to life is a straight and narrow way, and there are ditches on either side. One side is legalism. You can fall into that ditch. Then you struggle out of that ditch, and if you’re not careful, you’ll fall in the opposite ditch, which is self-indulgence or carnality. We have to walk between the two.